Quick summary: the biggest electricity provider in the country (ENEL) made an app (Juicepass) to find and manage their charging stations across the country. The Android Auto functionality of the app has been rejected by Google for non disclosed "security concerns while driving". The antitrust ruled out it was because Google wanted to sabotage competitor apps to the charging stations finder built-in in the Google Maps app. On top of the fine Google will need to provide the SDK to integrate their app with Android Auto.
And a quick reminder to everybody else that walled gardens don't actually help the consumer. They only arbitrarily restrict choice, they don't actually improve security (if any, that's provided by the sandboxing, not by the store "review").
If this company (ENEL) wasn't a huge state-wide electric company (inheriting their power and ties from the previous state-owned monopoly) how many chances do you think they had to fight?
Walled gardens are just security theater. The App Store revenue was $72bn in 2020, yet the review time for an app is a few hours. App reviewers barely have any qualifications, they're just "call center operators" running off a script.
I've watched the App Store reviewers try out apps (not in person, from logging) and they do seem to do a pretty thorough job of exercising the functionality.
It's extremely easy, but it also is extremely easy to get permanently banned if they find out you "switched on" a hidden feature once the app got into production. A permanent ban can be very damaging, so one needs to make sure to be completely legit when it comes to app store submission reviews and app store ratings
Can confirm. We got the Coinbase iOS app banned for doing this back in the day, when Apple did not allow bitcoin apps (IIRC showing the price was ok, transacting was not). Even after they relaxed their bitcoin restrictions (and calls to the head of app store), they still made us wait out the 12 month ban before reinstating the app.
Who said anything about laws? Apple's rules are no different from HN's rules. And for that matter, your house rules. They're arbitrary decisions to the liking of the respective party. They just have to not be against the law themselves. If they are problematic the solution isn't to generically "ban rules" (saying it out loud already hints at the "value" of this proposition) but to change the law to prohibit certain rules.
This is a super naive analogy - HN doesn't serve close to 50% of the US market, nor is it a platform through which billions of dollars transact. If it did very different rules apply, rightfully so, scale matters, market position matters - from Apple profit margins it's obvious they are abusing monopolistic position.
It's only naive because you chose the naive interpretation, based on sentiment and you not understanding the massive difference between laws and a company's rules. Until you understand what they are, and who decides if rules are against the law or not, mentioning "profit", "scale", "market position", and "different rules apply" doesn't get you closer to the point.
I'll take it down a couple of notches to make it easier: HN could serve every user under the Sun and still be entitled to have a (perfectly legal) rule that says "Don't solicit upvotes". No amount of "oh but at their scale" will change that.
Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. or any company actually do not write laws (they lobby and bribe for them but that's a different can of worms). They just write their own rules for their own products and services. Those rules have to be within the law and even if common sense and current evidence may say they break the law, it's up to a judge in an antitrust lawsuit to decide.
Indeed they don't. And yet they're still not laws which is great for us because those rules or practices can be found illegal.
As I tried to explain above, HN is free to have a rule which says "Don't solicit upvotes" but they can't have a rule "Don't talk to women". The simple answer is because no matter what that rule says, tit's not a law, it's just a rule which can be applied only until a judge decides it's against the law.
Given that Apple has no oversight at all here, they can do whatever they want. If an app makes it through review, but has forbidden functionality, Apple will just assume that the developer hid that functionality for the review process, and ban them. Doesn't matter if the approval was due to a mistake on the reviewer's part. Apple won't care.
It is actually pretty easy. As long as you don't use any private APIs, you can completely change the behavior of your app after the review by changing server side settings.
It is partly an intent issue. If you are attempting to pull one over on Apple by hiding app behavior during review, well, they are not going to be happy about that.
Other folks are also noting that, because humans are sometimes bad at evaluating each others' intent, it is probably a good idea to attempt to make one's intent clear if going this route, lest you annoy the gatekeeper.
a) Apple has invested heavily in automated review methods over the years.
b) I don't know what qualifications you think an app reviewer needs. They are not looking through the code but simply playing with the app on a range of devices.
c) It is only a few hours for updates. Initial app submissions often take days/weeks and are very thorough.
> a) Apple has invested heavily in automated review methods over the years.
There was a news here where malware was found on the Apple iOS store, and Apple changed their mind in the last moment and refused to inform the victims.
The reality show you (if you want to see) that
- malware happens (you can't make automatic analysis code to detect all possible issues )
- Apple users will mostly have a wrong image of the Store security due to Apple not informing victims when bad things happen and a big PR budget to paint a fiction.
The reviewers are there mostly to make sure you do not put a link to your website and buypass the Apple payments and make sure that the app does not crash and use the approved UX. I really hope you are not that navie to think they are opening the app in a debugger and checking for weird code.
You need register with a real name and credit card and pay 100$ to be able to publish anything on the app store. Irregardless of how effective the review process is even if you manage to sneak any app with malware past it Apple will still be able to remotely remove it from every user’s device and ban your account. This alone make the Appstore inherently safer than any system which would allow side loading.
As for code, they run relatively extensive automatic tests to detect whether private (banned/undocumented) APIs are used, I don’t know how effective they are at catching malware, though.
>You need register with a real name and credit card and pay 100$ to be able to publish anything on the app store.
This was done on Windows too, you were not forced but any business would sign their application, otherwise they user would get a scary warning that the developer is not know.
>As for code, they run relatively extensive automatic tests to detect whether private (banned/undocumented) APIs are used, I don’t know how effective they are at catching malware, though.
The sandbox should solve this, unless the Store bans APIs only for some or worse there are hidden APIs that should not be used and the sandbox is to dumb to notice you are using them , then this would be security by obscurity.
This topic is different then most of the other topics about side loading apps, in this case the giant refused to allow an application on the store, or allow access to an API without a good enough reason. This reveals again that rules are not fair and is very hard to get justice for the users.
I would suggest a law to force the giants to give always an exact reason of why an action aganst someone happened, I have personal experience where an account of mine was banned and I have no way to appeal and I have no idea what was wrong. The giants are shitting on us all, as long as the numbers of the victims are low enough some flashy ads would solve their PR problems. We need something to make it fair for the users, make it easy to get our justice.
This regulation specifically looks at platform-to-business relationships, and requires actual disclosure of reasons, notice periods, etc.
What we need to see are cases using this law (as it's pretty clear from article 4 what business' rights are), so it becomes too costly to trample over businesses in an unaccountable way. Once the cost of human intervention and support is lower than that of their legal bills and penalties, human support and intervention will return. Platforms are getting away without humans in the loop as a result of the lack of cost impact to them of a mistake. Once it hits their bottom line and gets their counsel in a pickle, it will start to change rapidly to preserve their bank balance.
I am from EU, I will try and google more, my issue is with PlayStation and I could not find with my searches any way to appeal or get clarifications on what happened. I am not sure if sending an email on a generic contact email address with a link to the law will work.
Your definition of "thorough" and mine are very different. I highly doubt they could do a meaningful review without the complete source code for the app. It's not unusual that apps change their behavior after the review and this sometimes comes from binary dylibs that the developer didn't write.
Noticing malware after it's installed based on a hash isn't any better than eg windows defender. The App Store doesn't help with that at all.
>You know about that because they were stopped. And since then Apple has tightened the rules and stepped up detection.
Nope, lots of people knew it was happening for years before Apple actually stopped it and it happens with other libraries still.
>No, because that would enable social engineering attacks once again.
People still get tricked into installing CA certs which is just as effective since everything has to be done in a browser due to the App Store restrictions. So no this hasn't prevented social engineering attacks, it's only changed them and it's come at an extreme cost.
> Noticing malware after it's installed based on a hash isn't any better than eg windows defender. The App Store doesn't help with that at all.
False. Once a scam has been detected, the developer account can be disabled, which adds cost to new attempts, unlike windows defender.
> Nope, lots of people knew it was happening for years before Apple actually stopped it and it happens with other libraries still.
That doesn’t change anything.
>No, because that would enable social engineering attacks once again.
> People still get tricked into installing CA certs which is just as effective since everything has to be done in a browser due to the App Store restrictions.
> So no this hasn't prevented social engineering attacks,
A false statement. Many kinds of social engineering attacks have definitely been prevented.
> it's only changed them
Here you admit that significant classes of attack have been prevented.
Your argument is that because not all attacks have been prevented, there is no value in preventing attacks.
I'm arguing that it hasn't prevented attacks to a degree that was worth the cost (completely forfeiting ownership of personal computers by anyone that wants to participate in group chats with iphone users.)
>Here you admit that significant classes of attack have been prevented.
I don't think people care whether they lost things on their phone because of malware or because of a fake CA cert, the attack works pretty much the same way and has the same result.
>False. Once a scam has been detected, the developer account can be disabled, which adds cost to new attempts, unlike windows defender.
You don't need a dev account to distribute malware in dylibs.
>> Nope, lots of people knew it was happening for years before Apple actually stopped it and it happens with other libraries still.
>That doesn’t change anything.
It means the App Store doesn't stop malware before it's able to exfiltrate data from large numbers of users for long periods of time. That's the justification for it.
> I'm arguing that it hasn't prevented attacks to a degree that was worth the cost
Ok, but that’s not what you said before,
> (completely forfeiting ownership of personal computers by anyone that wants to participate in group chats with iphone users.)
This is false. There are many group chat programs, that people use cross platform and they are more popular than iMessage.
Nobody if ‘forfeiting ownership’ of anything anyway - that’s just an ideological tautology.
If you you want a platform that can do both iMessage, and install apps without review, then you can use a Mac.
So literally no part of your statement is true.
>Here you admit that significant classes of attack have been prevented.
> I don't think people care whether they lost things on their phone because of malware or because of a fake CA cert, the attack works pretty much the same way and has the same result.
They may not know or care about the technical details but they do care about the risk level, so this is a moot point.
>False. Once a scam has been detected, the developer account can be disabled, which adds cost to new attempts, unlike windows defender.
> You don't need a dev account to distribute malware in dylibs.
No, but you do to distribute it to App Store users.
>> Nope, lots of people knew it was happening for years before Apple actually stopped it and it happens with other libraries still.
>That doesn’t change anything.
> It means the App Store doesn't stop malware before it's able to exfiltrate data from large numbers of users for long periods of time. That's the justification for it.
False. It just means that some apps slip through the protections. It doesn’t say a thing about the ones which are stopped.
This is a repeat of the earlier fallacy: “if the protection doesn’t stop all attacks then we don’t need the protection”, which is obviously not true.
>> I'm arguing that it hasn't prevented attacks to a degree that was worth the cost
>Ok, but that’s not what you said before,
It's not worth the cost IE a scam, literally what I wrote in my first post.
>If you you want a platform that can do both iMessage, and install apps without review, then you can use a Mac.
Ah yes let me just go ahead and fold up the macbook so I can put it in my pocket. If you want to be included in a group of iPhone users that use iMessage you must own an iPhone. Apple knows this and that's why there's no web interface for iMessage.
>No, but you do to distribute it to App Store users.
Someone does, but it does not need to be the dylib author.
> just means that some apps slip through the protections.
This wasn't some, it was happening (and likely still is) on a massive scale and affected most popular apps.
>This is a repeat of your earlier fallacy: “if the protection doesn’t stop all attacks then we don’t need the protection”, which is obviously not true.
Forcing the "protection" on everyone, despite the extreme cost, is wrong. Especially since the "protection" does very little to stop this kind of attack in practice. Not a fallacy, it's not worth the cost IE a scam.
> If you want to be included in a group of iPhone users that use iMessage you must own an iPhone.
This is true but also meaningless. If you want to be included in a group of Android users who use Facebook messenger, you must own an Android device. If you want to be part of a group of Windows users who use signal, you must own a Windows machine.
All three are true, but presumably you can see they have absolutely nothing to do with app review.
Those numbers came from Apple, lets pull them apart:
>App Store stopped more than $1.5 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2020
They never justify or source this, they literally just pulled it out of their ass.
>Apps rejected for containing hidden or undocumented features
A lot of those are probably development tools that users legitimately wanted.
>Other rejected apps
Good job they blocked some stupid obvious scams. The web is full of these so the users careless enough to fall for them will still get scammed. I don't see how that justifies the ridiculous situation they've created.
>credit card numbers are never shared with merchant.
The whole point behind credit cards is that you don't care if someone steals the number. Otherwise everyone would be using PKI instead of shouting an ID number at eachother. So yeah, thanks I guess for saving some banks money but that does little to help the end user.
> They never justify or source this, they literally just pulled it out of their ass.
You do realize they have the data, right?
>Apps rejected for containing hidden or undocumented features
A lot of those are probably development tools that users legitimately wanted.
You never justify or source this, you literally just …
… I think you know how this goes.
>Other rejected apps
> Good job they blocked some stupid obvious scams. The web is full of these so the users careless enough to fall for them will still get scammed.
No, people trust the App Store more than they trust the web. That’s the whole point.
> I don't see how that justifies the ridiculous situation they've created.
The situation where consumers are happy to pay for software because someone is weeding out scams?
>credit card numbers are never shared with merchant.
The whole point behind credit cards is that you don't care if someone steals the number. Otherwise everyone would be using PKI instead of shouting an ID number at eachother. So yeah, thanks I guess for saving some banks money but that does little to help the end user.
I guess you’ve never had a card stolen or been the victim of fraud. Eventually you can get your money back in most cases, but it can take a long time and be a huge hassle.
Again you argue against beneficial protections for no apparent reason.
>This is true but also meaningless. If you want to be included in a group of Android users who use Facebook messenger, you must own an Android device.
Nope, you can use Facebook messenger from an iPhone or even a Pinephone. Apple is running the only popular chat app which demands you use only their hardware.
> If you want to be part of a group of Windows users who use signal, you must own a Windows machine.
No you don't need a windows machine for this, just something that can run signal.
>All three are true, but presumably you can see they have absolutely nothing to do with app review.
They do because anyone participating in a real time iMessage group is forced to put up with whatever software policy Apple dictates on their phone.
>There is no extreme cost.
The cost is that you have to hand your ssh keys over to closed source apps to use ssh, you can't use decent chat applications because the app author has to have a full-time ops team (distinct from the team managing the chat server even though they already have the resources) managing the F**ing notification server because those are Apple's policies. You can't run most desktop apps because of licensing restrictions. There's almost no community maintained software so almost everything on the phone either costs a ton or harvests every last bit of data it can find (which is typically beyond what Apple supposedly allows) and anything remotely useful is unprofitable to maintain.
Quite simply: the cost is that almost all the software is absolute shit.
I meant to mention this in my other reply but can't now because of noprocrast.
>You are one of a tiny minority of specialists who can do this. End users in general quite obviously cannot.
"Experts" inspecting the source code for apps allowed for some bare minimum security checks. Companies buy out smaller software projects and add spyware to them fairly often (on the iPhone this usually happens via dylibs rather than the App publisher purposefully doing it.) and Apple has removed one of the only ways to catch this without an adequate replacement. The effect is much worse overall security.
> Companies buy out smaller software projects and add spyware to them fairly often (on the iPhone this usually happens via dylibs rather than the App publisher purposefully doing it.)
Yes.
and Apple has removed one of the only ways to catch this without an adequate replacement.
No - these can be scanned for during app review.
> The effect is much worse overall security.
No, consumer software outside the App Store is rarely examined by experts who have access to the source code.
If you hand auth secrets to random apps on the App Store they will get stolen, this happens all the time. Having some contractor spend a few hours poking at the GUI doesn't mean consumers aren't required to be responsible.
c is not correct. I publish lots of apps for clients and I regularly get new apps published in less than 3 hours. Apples official stats are: 90% of apps get reviewed in less than 48h and 50% in less than 24.
I agree with you, But you know there are different rules for each app.
Small developers don't get same access as big developers and their apps get klled for smallest reason just by having some obscure policy or change in policy.
Developers don't have same access as Apple google eg: Screen Time
This may be a hot take, but I have a problem with the way that first article equates "extremely overpriced" with "scam".
A scam is when you've been deceived or defrauded.
If you consent to pay $10 a week for an app that doesn't provide what it claims to, that's one thing, and that should be actionable. But if it does what it claims to, not liking the price does not equate to being a scam.
I misunderstood your criticism; so while I do believe such subscriptions are scams in the sense that they prey on victims via deception and the presence of such actors undermines trust in the marketplace thus undermining fluid trade, thus such scams should be prevented - that's really kind of neither here nor their, because that's at best a laudable goal, not some kind of requirement for Apple as app-store manager.
If we judge by the result these app store seem to do fairly well security-wise, no?
Compared to Windows as a case study of what happens when you let users install anything they want from untrusted sources, it seems that the app stores do fairly well at culling obvious malware. At least that's what I experienced comparing the number of time I had to cleanup a friend or family member's computer filled with malware and browser toolbars vs. iphones and androids.
A large part of the stability can be attributed to sandboxing. This is what prevents apps from gaining unprivileged access and destabilizing the system. This is the time where relatives will call you.
What you don't see, is all the apps that steal the user's data.
Curation obviously helps but it's difficult to measure to what extent.
> A large part of the stability can be attributed to sandboxing. This is what prevents apps from gaining unprivileged access and destabilizing the system. This is the time where relatives will call you.
True
> What you don't see, is all the apps that steal the user's data.
Exactly this. Apple now has policies against fingerprinting etc. which can’t be prevented by sandboxing.
> Curation obviously helps but it's difficult to measure to what extent.
Web browsers don't have widely known glaring security holes in them even though their vendors don't approve the content that's viewed through them.
On the other hand, you can't be completely sure that sandboxes on mobile devices don't have actively exploited security issues as there are many ways to bypass app review from discovering the true functionality of an app.
> Web browsers don't have widely known glaring security holes in them even though their vendors don't approve the content that's viewed through them.
Anything widely known gets fixed quickly. There are plenty of holes in browser sandboxing. The number approximately doubles as soon as you look at anything !Chrome, too.
Yeah, but by that same logic there may be unknown holes in app review and app sandbox as well. And since Apple aren't big on publicising their missteps (while Chrome is developed in the open), we may never really know how secure the app store model really is.
> Yeah, but by that same logic there may be unknown holes in app review and app sandbox as well.
To exploit those you need to get past app review in the first place, though, and the type of code that can do stuff like this for the most part sticks out like a sore thumb when subjected to static analysis.
Most of Apple's checks around this stuff are automated, I understand, and are applied to every submission instantly.
I'd argue only the revocation is needed. macOS is moving towards that model: every app requires notarization, Apple provides it without asking questions, but reserves the right to revoke the running privileges of any app. This makes so much more sense.
There is a lot of phone malware, showing random ad notifications, collecting gps data, sending it to whoknowswhere, some even sending premium sms messages, etc. There are less drive-by installs, but more intentional installs (eg. flashlight app with a gajillion permissions).
The last article explicitly mentions that most of the malware needs iPhone to be jailbroken or the app to be installed outside of the App Store, which kind of proves my point.
The research by Panda Security also showed that the ratio of malware on Android compared to iPhone is 50 to 1.
It is a lot more than "theatre". The first line of defence is the sandboxing built into the OS. The second line is a lot of automated analysis of the binaries that are uploaded. The human review is the third line, but that is much less about security.
So please explain why the licenses need to cost a fortune? Simple Bayesian thinking will tell you what the real motive is, and what is being used as the coverup motive.
IMO, walled gardens are besides the point. Whatever the working definition of walled garden, we can find some consumer or situation for whom it arguably makes sense.
The real problem isn't the wall, it's the gate. Adwords, Android, FB, Twitter, Spotify, Steam... those are all about controlling the gate. At that point, others do the work and the gatekeeper makes the profit.
When Apple's App store first came out consumers were sour about a decade of "crapp(s)" on Microsoft Windows.
That is, you pretty much expected to download software and have it trash your machine on a regular basis.
Things are better today, half of that is people realizing that it has to get better ("national security" today, but it's much bigger than national in scope) and the other half is people realizing it is possible to get better, and Apple's App store is one reason for that.
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Improvements in HW and SW are what helped Microsoft, not the Microsoft store -- since Win 8 I think I've had a Windows machine where it was really possible to download third-party apps from the Microsoft store about 10% of machine*years. Part of that is that it was disabled on corporate laptops I've used, the other part is that the metadata database for the Microsoft store gets corrupted on a regular basis.
I've contacted Microsofties about that and what they tell me is that I should delete my account on my computer and then reinstall the account and spend or two work days reconfigurings all of the "normal" Windows apps that I used on an everyday basis (Firefox, Jetbrains, Creative Cloud, Python, ...) I tell them "there's a procedure to rebuild the metadata database because I've see the database get rebuilt when the six month OS updates happen" and they act as if they didn't hear anything.
For that matter Microsoft seems to be a counter-example to "the power of monopoly".
For instance there are several third-party gaming "app" stores for Windows such as Steam. One thing they all have in common is that they work.
When Win 8 came out DropBox and a number of imitators had apps that worked for Windows. There was one DropBox imitator that didn't work, and that was Microsoft's OneDrive. Office was jiggered to push you to save files to OneDrive, but if you were saving files to OneDrive you could frequently NOT BE ABLE TO SAVE FILES AT ALL!
To add insult to injury, this would also trigger harassment from Word the next time I open it about the files it didn't let me save. It's like this
As an Apple consumer, having a “walled garden” is great for UX, IMO. I don’t have to deal with a ton of shitty wallet apps, everything is in one App Store, etc.
I find this much preferable to the situation on Android.
Just to explain for non-native anglophones, I think what they meant was "gave out a rule", but in idiomatic English "ruled something out" means it has been eliminated as a possibility.
I don’t think this is an accurate definition or etymology. The phrase can mean “formally remove” or just “eliminate”. I think it always alludes to using a stick of wood to draw a line rather than a regulation or law.
The really sad thing about this case is that there is _no way_ that Google made anything like $100M from the charging station finder in Google Maps in Italy. That functionality reeks to me of something made by a small group of Googlers because they legitimately care about promoting electric cars and making life easier for their owners, not because Google particularly cares if they dominate the electric vehicle charging station finding market. Now that the functionality has cost them $100M and however much effort it takes to make a regulator-approved SDK for Android Auto, I'm worried that the lawyers at the company will just shut down that feature and others like it, which would be a net loss for users.
That's only sad if all they did was make a product and not share it with others. They also rejected a competitor access to their monopoly on the service. It's supposed to sting. Otherwise they would just do this shit all the time.
exactly, this is not the reinforcement you want to give the big tech - putting fines for the actually useful stuff using crappy antitrust arguments? Come on.
This will just encourage them to kill all the genuinely useful stuff they do because honestly their legal teams can't spend hours vetting all of these small features and apps which provide immense value to certain subsets of users. And for what ? The shitty JuicePass app with under 2.5 rating.
Distracted driving is a big problem, but my experience is that people have superstitious ideas about what is safe and what is dangerous in areas like that.
You can certainly do experiments, and the conclusion you seem to reach is that you're in a lot safer with a car that has physical buttons for the audio, heat, etc. (Had "luxury" carmakers been on the ball five years or so they would have kicked the infotainment systems to the curb and would be giving customers a premium experience today -- how many $1000 does Android Auto knock off the resale value of your car?)
Totally. I'm maybe a week or two away from buying a Model 3, but the thing I keep coming back to is the whole "everything is controlled by a touchscreen" crap. Even when physical controls are not designed perfectly, you can still get used to them to the point where they are muscle memory and no longer a distraction. No matter how awesome they are, touch screens will never not be a distraction.
I want Android Auto to know what type of plug I have and Google Maps to just show me all compatible chargers. And possibly handle payments. Like what Tesla has been doing for years [0].
Now there's some government developed app to duplicate that functionality but only for their special snowflake network and only in their jurisdiction. Just crossed the border from France to Italy? Install this app (is it in international app stores as well? Do I have to switch my phone to that country?). Ohh now it has it's own map but no navigation so I'm switching back and forth between that and Google Maps.
That’s not really what it’s about. It’s about if they can do that and throw out competing apps doing the same thing. Or if you will have the ability to choose an other app if you don’t like google.
Of cause integration and ease of use become harder if there’s multiple networks and apps, but that’s separate from the question if they should be allowed by google.
Not sure why nobody else is asking this, but what is the evidence? Did an investigation reveal that this actually was the reason for the App Store rejection?
This was an antitrust ruling, so chances are that the process was something like:
- app developer (here, the giant state-backed energy company ENEL) complains to antitrust authority about getting denied access to store
- authority asks Google to justify itself
- Google makes a very weak argument, refuses to disclose the internal decision-making process that resulted in blocking access
- authority goes “oh really?”, proceeds to slap Google with a fine
Now Google can decide whether they want to take this to court (which, being Italy, will probably take 5 to 10 years); pay the fine and allow ENEL in; or just ignore the ruling and dare the state to slap them harder (which again, would probably mean a good 5+ years will pass before sanctions are actually enacted, but might result in higher fines).
It can't be that simple because there is working ChargePoint integration with Android Auto. If they were just blocking 3rd party apps that wouldn't exist.
this is because they think the courts are politicized, not because the judiciary takes input from the government. In fact there has been a constant conflict between judges and government for the last 30 years.
Kinda. The judicial branch is rigorously separated from the other two, but it self-organises in a way that often replicates the ideological groups emerging in regular politics (they have their own little parliament, basically). When the postwar political equilibrium crumbled under the weight of its own corruption and Berlusconi got in power, effectively altering the ideological landscape, the judiciary “class” did not immediately follow, since most of them saw the guy as a dodgy felon (which was technically correct); and things have been a bit hairy ever since.
It's hard to say, certainly some investigations have appeared political, but in US terms there is distrust against "public attorneys" rather than against judges (and Italy permits one to change career between the two).
But what I meant to say is that one political side have complained about judges for 30 years, which has impacted the public opinion.
See the effects Trump has had on institutional trust in the US, and make it last 5 mandates.
AFAIK controlling shareholder means that the shareholder has more than 50% of the voting power. They or the group they belong to have unilateral control of the company barring some restrictions.
But controlling looks to more about how much voting power and influence you have rather than how many shares, because remember companies can have different classes of shares.
The way antitrust is working in recent years is kind of ridiculous. Google in Europe is becoming a rich case study in antitrust meh.
You find that adwords engages in a blatant "monopolistic abuse" in some specific sense. In the Adwords EU case for example, Google was both monopsonising (google search) and monopolising search advertising. But, the actual violations are specific, like exclusivity requirements and other technical infractions buried in their take-it-or-leave-it contracts with "partners.^"
Google get a fine. They deny culpability. They pay a fine and move on. Whether it's 100m or 2bn doesn't really matter. Google are demonstrably willing to pay far more (eg acquisition, browser kickbacks, etc.) to maintain a monopolistic position. Besides minor tweaks, there's no reason for them to change.
What's the point? Antitrust can't be useful as a violation-fine paradigm. These cases/fines don't affect the monopoly or free the market in any useful sense.
IMO, we need some way to declare a company "Big" and apply special rules to them. If those rules are onerous, that might create some organic pressure to split and/or help smaller incumbents compete.
There is no point to antitrust if its totally reactive, handing out fines for moving violations. The point of antitrust is trust-busting, to affect market structure. The point if to have a competitive market.
All the 1990s stuff is playing out. Just like the MSFT case, we see that operating systems, browsers (now app stores) are monopoly prone and that it's a big deal. On the other side, the 90s "portal" concept is fully realized now. In the digital economy, controlling the windows of consumption is everything. None of the costs, all of the profit... literally all in a lot of cases.
^Newspapers didn't have the advantage search partners had in their monopoly claim, because Google doesn't have agreements with them. No contract, no abusive clauses. The take it or leave it offer is "give us your content for free, or go away." Formally, Google isn't even doing business with them.
> IMO, we need some way to declare a company "Big" and apply special rules to them. If those rules are onerous, that might create some organic pressure to split and/or help smaller incumbents compete.
Past a point, they should be regulated like an utility.
IDK if it's "past a point," but in some cases maybe.
I'm torn on that though. EG, what would it actually mean if FB or twitter became "regulated like utilities?" Interoperability? Portability? IMO, these are pretty finicky problems for a regulator. I think it would likely look like the mandated personal data dumps we have today. Some clunky feature that few use, and don't change the structure of the market. Useful transparency, but not really game changing.
Regulated equal access? Court-like proceeding to confirm bans? I'm not feeling it. I suspect it will entrench monopolies further.
A Telecom or EnergyCo is fundamentally different from a FB or Google. Regulators needed to make sure everyone had access, because it's always more profitable to just exclude certain people/areas. Prices are an issue because infrastructure monopoly. Also because government/regulators typically fund a lot of the capex.
There is almost no cost, marginal or fixed, associated with instant messages, shares, likes, links, etc. If Facebook and Twitter folded tomorrow, we would still have plenty of all of these because they are not scarce. Maybe there's a case for cloud computing as a utility, but even here I'm hesitant.
Enough with analogies to 19th century monopolies. Platform monopolies should be regulated as platform monopolies, not utilities. New thinking.
In any case, google is the perfect target for actual trustbusting. Separate search from adwords and android. Ban default buying. Ban mergers.
The old challenge was (eg) trust busting steel without harming the actual production of steel. Today's problem has little to do with production. It does have a lot to do with share prices. Is there really an appetite for turning Alphabet from a $1.5trn company into a $150bn company?
The EU's initial proposed version of the "Digital Services Act", requires that when a service takes down information that they think is "illegal" or incompatible with the terms of service, They are required to provide the "facts and circumstances" used to arrive at that decision, as well as reference to the specific term of service they think is violated, and why they feel the information violates that.
Furthermore, they must provide an appeals mechanism for both information takedowns and any account suspensions/bans associated with them (and besides things like non-payment, I'd bet the majority of account suspensions/bans on online services are due to some posted content the company finds objectionable).
Lastly, if the internal appeals process fails to satisfy the user, the user initiate a what is basically an electronic binding arbitration process with a certified " out-of-court dispute settlement body" of the user's choosing, with this body having the power to overturn the companies decision.
That last part sound an awful lot like "Court-like proceedings to confirm bans".
I suspect the final law may not be as pro-consumer in these areas as the initial draft is (many big companies will not be happy about this part of the law and will try to kill it off).
If it does survive it would be much better then all too common: "We are banning you because we think you broke an unspecified part of the terms of service. We won't be more specific because we don't have to be, and are scared that people trying to break the rules could learn how they got caught. We won't even tell you that this was a fully automated process with no humans involved, that gets things wrong x% of the time. There is no appeal, unless you can get Twitter or the news media sufficiently riled up against us."
I suppose we'll see how it works out, assuming it does become law. There is devil in the generalities here, but plenty of devil in the detail too.
Detail-wise.... Compliance, currently, is the art of ticking boxes while not changing anything fundamental. Too often, politicians and advocates have their eyes on the spirit of (proposed) laws while corporations and their advocates put their eye on how "compliance" will actually work procedurally. The latter approach is more effective.
That doesn't mean no goals are ever achieved, but it does dampen a lot. EU transparency laws, right to be forgotten and such are good examples. They might establish moral rights, but they don't affect really achieve big practical goals.
Generality-wise... I think the problem for (eg) free expression is the platform oligopoly itself, not their corporate policies. That's not my main concern here though. My main concern is: These laws are only necessary because monopoly. The danger is that the laws entrench monopoly, by applying them unnecessarily to smaller platforms.
That said, we'll see when/if it happens. Thanks for the info.
Generally good comment, but if search is separated from ads, how does it make money? I'm totally on board with splitting up Google, but losing Google search (or search becoming notably worse) would not be worth it for me. The competition is just so bad, and always has been.
Part of why searching is as painful as it is is because it has been deemed acceptable to pollute the search space. SEO should be neither encouraged or allowed. It is nothing less than adversarial corruption of a shared index.
Boolean searching works. Go back to a library catalog sometime and be amazed at how quickly you can get relevant results when every Tom, Dick, and Methuseleh aren't shoveling extra irrelevant feces into the index.
There is no practical way to disallow SEO. Search results have to be ranked somehow in order to be usable for most people. And site owners will always figure out tricks to game the ranking algorithms.
It's not SEO that's the problem. SEO is a symptom of the perverse incentives.
So Google has created incentives (via ad embedding in user-sites) for entities to generate content and compete with each-other for who can show the most ads. This in turn "pollutes the index" as the other poster phrased it, which makes it more and more difficult to find actual real (unique?) content, which then Google turns around and supposedly "helps" us with.
Let's be honest. Despite it's surface-level gigantic scale, the internet is actually very tiny when it comes to real genuine content. My wild estimate is that 99% of it is spam. Even in the case of user-generated content, for every genuine blog where someone shares their thoughts and unique insights or content, there are a thousand blogs which are just there to get ad-views by generating any content that might get someone to look there. I can't even find the former type of blog/site anymore. The only place I still encounter those on occasion is when it's linked to from HN. And the ones I do encounter that way, I find that even when I try to, I can't find it via any sort of generic search (i.e. not cheating by using the site name / author / unique phrases).
How is searching painful? It's gotten better with almost every year.
I only see this sentiment here on HN, along with many other shitty takes about how pure the internet used to be. Are you talking about that era when opening the wrong search result would bombard your screen with millions of popups and install 20 toolbars on your machine?
Please tell me when this magical time of no spam in search results existed? 1995?
It wasn't a case of no spam; but rather predictable spam.
After a while you'd start to recognize the Web rings. The "just link" pages became extremely obvious after a while, and you could generally reliably get the same results regardless of where you searched from or what you were doing when the time came to search. You had far fewer syndication mills, and you could even find resources reliably.
The net was a reasonably navigable thing even to children doing school research. Nowadays, I have to explain to kids all the myriad pitfalls that exist nowadays, when they look up something, ho back a bit later, and can't find their resource anymore.
And that's just the bloody legit stuff. When you talk malware, we're in a completely different world nowadays.
You do a search, it says millions of results, the first pages all have results without the quoted terms in the page at all. They don't show "we don't have any good results" if they can display a bunch of ads on a bunch of pages with useless results.
Google will continue to make money as it does now, through adwords as a "search partner." This is also how other SEs make money. The biggest antitrust case Google has lost so far has related directly to this.
Would they make less money? Yes, probably. It's hard to say how much, but it would still likely be enough to run Google.
I think it's easier to understand the paradigm with Twitter or FB, since they're simpler. Facebook currently makes about $100bn pa from ads. Circa 2015, they were operating profitably on about $10bn ad revenue. Twitter has had a similar (more modest) trajectory. They spend a lot of money running FB & Twitter, because they can, but there's no reason to think FB or Google Search on far less revenue than they bring in currently.
There are versions of what I'm suggesting that likely affect revenue moderately, and versions that could hit harder. IMO, in either case, I don't believe there is any meaningful consumer harm or ill effects outside of FB's shareholders or perhaps employees.
This isn't true of all monopolies/sectors. It's true of FB, Google, maybe twitter.
That said, I think the risks are way smaller than previous era's trustbusting. I like FB as an example, as I said. I'm pretty confident that FB would be pretty much the same on far less revenue because they were pretty much the same on less revenue in recent years.
Comparable social media services run of far less revenue (scaled whichever way you like). You can also look at their accounts, which reveal a lot. The simplest clue is profit margins.
If we're wrong... one social media service declines and another takes its place. Personally, I see very little risk. The actual risk, IMO, is not really about keeping these services viable. There no "shit! I broke auto-manufacturing and now we don't have cars" risk.
It's about share price. Smallish declines in revenue can mean big declines in profit. Any decline in revenue can lead to a collapse of share prices, regardless of profit. The big techs are a big part of the S&P, and high profile. Quite a lot of the S&P's value relates directly to monopoly, so antitrust (IMO) directly conflicts with equity values... and things could get "macroeconomic" from there.
All that said, I'm not advocating anything intentionally destructive. Google is, I suspect, expecting to be broken up eventually. I think that was part of the Alphabet restructuring logic.
The primary objection that comes to my mind, in the vein of your comment,is a hayek-esque information argument. A Hayekian logic though, is totally incompatible with paragraph 5 above though, and I'm quite confident about that... so I don't know where it fits in.
And we need an effective regulator. For example, I am baffled by the level of oligopoly allowed in the EU cellular/telecom industry. It is quite obvious that prices are synchronized between providers if you watch their dynamics over time. They are currently killing prepaid cards as well.
There are now countless eSIM offers (mostly for data) that are way cheaper than the previous prepaid options, so I'm not convinced of this.
(I'm sure the roaming fee limits played a big part in this, because it effectively allows any mobile operator to resell data at the wholesale rate, or even below it because data is usually sold in packages that are rarely used up in full.)
Doesn't that effectively mean that these companies will become further entrenched and nearly impossible to dislodge from their market positions? A prime example is Google Fibre, who tried to dislodge existing cable/internet companies, and failed primarily because of regulatory entrenchment.
Why not allow the market to be more inclusive? This will help create exactly the competitive pressure that we all benefit from.
Utilities aren't regulated to function like "non-monopolies," generally. They're regulated because (ATT, at least) they were seen as inevitable "natural" monopolies.
There really isn't one "theory of monopolies" that is useful in all times and places. Social Media is not Telecom or electricity. Amazon is not a railroad.
Trustbusting is an anti-monopoly strategy, and it doesn't really work in spaces where monopoly is unavoidable.
Utilities are super heavily regulated. I'm not sure for the US, but for example frequently they can't enter new markets, so they can't leverage their monopoly to crush competition in other markets.
And regarding working well, aren't a lot of people in favor of municipal broadband (an utility) vs Verizon & co. (oligopoly, not even a full blown monopoly)?
California PGE which provides electricity and gas to big portion of public is a moving train wreck. It's corrupted and dangerous. Pipeline explosion, electricity transmission line caused fire burn a whole town happened with worrying frequency. Heavy regulations don't prevent big bonus to executives and degrading infrastructure.
Making an electric or gas company a government entity would at least provide a chance to prosecute its corrupt operators for official misconduct and criminal fraud (see the slow moving train wreck called CalPERS, some executive frog-marching would fix that quickly).
> IMO, we need some way to declare a company "Big" and apply special rules to them.
Careful though. A monopoly may abuse its position, which is bad, but a big company may be big because they are good and people use them, which is good.
This is actually the difference between the US and the EU when it comes to monopoly lawsuits. The US has to prove that the behavior of a monopoly was harmful to customers/consumers. The EU has no burden of proof and can just take market size as a way to go after them.
The general problem I see here is how you slice the market to say a given company has a monopoly. It sometimes feels like those going after large companies try to slice the market in such as way to say they are monopolies, when other slice it in another way to show that it's not. Which slicing is "correct" is really hard, especially when markets shift relatively quickly.
Monopolies are inherently harmful to the customer. A monopoly implies lack of competition. If lack of competition is not harmful to the customer, then competition is not beneficial. If competition is not beneficial in a given market, there is no reason for it to be a market to begin with and the monopoly should be expropriated.
> Monopolies are inherently harmful to the customer. A monopoly implies lack of competition.
I disagree. When you look at a company that is dominant in some part of the marketplace at a given point it time, you need to understand how they got there. The monopoly poster child Standard Oil rose-up when there used to be many more oil processing companies, but Standard Oil was able to do things for cheaper because they used more byproducts from the oil to create different products (which let them sell things like lamp oil for less). So sometimes monopolies rise-up because that one company is able to fill a market segment better than the competition.
The question then becomes, once they have a monopoly and others see this, how can potential competitors react. Can others copy (and improve) the same processing system that the monopoly has to produce a similar product for a similar price (maybe even less)? If so, then they can rise up and the original company will no longer be a monopoly. But if that original company takes steps to squelch the competition, you start getting into what the US has defined as "anti competitive" practices. These were developed because the past showed us that this leads to harming consumers.
We also have a lot of government granted monopolies. Copyright and IP law are time-limited monopolies on a given product. We have private business that operate on federal land (like national parks) that may be given a local monopoly within that region. Sometimes we make tradeoffs and grant monopolies.
There's usually some market reason for a monopoly to exist. Often, it's a temporary reason. That doesn't mean it isn't harmful to consumers, unless you think that market dynamics are inevitably beneficial.
Google, has several market reasons for their monopoly.
(1) The biggest reason is like economies of scale and network effects, but not quite. Online ad markets need to be huge to be good. Bigger market means tighter targeting segments, which is everything. This is why FB & Google make >10X more per customer than their no. 2s and 3s. Data aggregation is like this too. Some data on some users is not proportionally valuable to all data on all users.
(2) Software's infinite economies of scale. Economists like to point to this reason (0 marginal costs) as primary, but FWIW, I don't think it's why google is a monopoly. It probably is why software is monopoly-prone. It does explain the OS/Browser centralisation pretty well.
(3)Normal economies of scale and network effects.
(4)Path dependencies.
Does that mean that Google's monopoly benefits consumers? Who are consumers anyway? Formally, it's advertisers. If monopolies aren't assumed harmful, why do we even need to curb anti-competitive practices in the first place?
>> government granted monopolies; Copyright and IP; federal land, etc
Agreed. I'm not talking about "monopoly," the dictionary definition. I'm talking about the phenomenon in 2021, a handful of companies, most with a tell-tale >30% profit margin. I'm not talking about the exclusive cafe inside on IKEA.
> Monopolies are inherently harmful to the customer. A monopoly implies lack of competition.
Depends why there is a lack of competition. Are there barriers of entry to the market? Were they put up by the company? Or do they just have such an awesome product at a great price they no one can offer a better / commutative alternative?
Antitrust law is weird, so I can't comment on this definitively. That said, in the EU-Adwords case, the focus was on "abuses," primarily in the contract with search partners. Adwords is their buyer, rather than seller. Technically, Google is the monopoly, adwords is the monopsony.
In any case, prosecutors needed to prove harm/abuse affected search partners, and the fine was presumably based around that.
There is a problem defining the market sometimes, but that wasn't a problem here. It's a "crack for economists" type of problem, with a lot more theory than needed for practical purposes.
The problem is/was that these courts aren't a tool that can do the job. Courts can keep monopolies from doing certain things, with varying degrees of effectiveness. They can't prevent a monopoly from being a monopoly.
True, that's why I'm against general rules (aka laws) as the main/only tool. A cloud platform is not a telecom, is not a search engine, etc.
I don't agree with "monopoly may* abuse its position*" though. Monopolies exert their impact by existing as monopolies. They may or may not (as in the adwords case) "abuse" this position in specific, known, ways like anticompetitive contracts in the adwords-EU case... but this tends to be pretty marginal.
Google bought Doubleclick in 2007. After this, they owned both the biggest search engine and the biggest ad marketplace... their competitors' only revenue source. Throw in Android, Chrome & a $20bn contract to be Apple's default.
At this point it's all about market structure and control over choke points, nothing to do with consumer preferences. I'm not saying shut down google, or prevent people from using it. I'm saying that a market structure with only one choice is a monopoly, and that's bad for everyone but the monopolist.
>but a big company may be big because they are good and people use them, which is good.
I agree in part, but I disagree that 'good' can be a state that applies universally. Personally, I think of it as a tag that you can apply to individual actions on a case-by-case basis. Also, is there any company that has gotten big solely because 'they are good and people use them'?
I'd argue that the latter eventually turns into the former with a probability approaching 1. The incentives are just too screwed up for it to happen any other way.
The fix isn't the fines, it's the requirement to stop given behaviors. Google won't care about the fine it just got, sure, but it also can't block competing apps in this way again, at least in this jurisdiction.
It's a small victory, but it's also a hole in the armor. One of many, as various antitrust cases handle various abuses. Unfortunately, progress is slow but we're making it.
Ive long held that corps should be limited to a single trade category (as per trademarks). I think that change would solve a lot of the complexities that megacorps introduce to the application of legislature.
I don't agree, but I think it's an example of rules that could be applied selectively to megacorps. Banning supermarkets from selling hot coffee, so to speak, is a problem.
It's also a problem on the megacorp scale. If Google wasn't allowed to do gmail, android and such, would we have been better off? That said, if we're only talking about a handful of megacorps, there's no need to be abstract or simple with rules. There are lots of ways to keep them in a lane.
Android, Youtube & adwords are great candidates for IPO. Why not force a float? This immediately fixes most of the issues so far demonstrated in court. It compensates AlphaGoog at market rates, preserves an incentive to innovate...
Before that though... ban mergers! Reverse merges. The whole foods acquisition is a worrying one. The "multiple" discrepancies between amazon and regular retail is so high that there's an arbitrage-like force pushing towards these acquisitions. Tesla & other auto manufacturers are a similar scenario.
Consider this... Acquiring the entire publicly traded retail sector would dilute Amazon's shares by circa 25%-50%, most of that going to Walmart and Costco. They could buy the fashion/apparel industry with petty cash. They could acquire UPS. That would make other online retailers compete with amazon like Google competes with its search partners... same logic as amazon marketplace, but more.
...yet, it will absolutely matter if it's $20B - Google's 2020 operating income was $41B.
You're making the claim that since Google wasn't fined enough, fines don't work - which is absurd.
Try making the fines a reasonably large percentage of gross revenue from the previous year - say, 10%. 10% of Google's 2020 gross revenue ($182B) is $18B, which is almost half of their operating income. That will have an effect.
The problem with this is that you can easily bankrupt a company by codifying exceedingly onerous terms.
Google (to take your example) happens to be able to (barely) afford 10% of their revenue taken from their income. Another company with a different cost structure (perhaps in another sector) might not be able to afford that. The upshot is that providing a codified “one size fits all” punishment could be disastrous (if you consider preserving companies to be desirable: for the sake of this argument I do, but entirely legitimately you might not).
In the case of Italy (I’m Italian) and it’s awkward, glacial justice system, that’s a very dangerous assumption to make. This place is already hostile enough towards businesses.
Fines are, largely calibrated one way or another. It's not marked to gross revenue... but it is usually marked to the infraction. In the EU-Adwords case, the $2bn fine was relative to the size of adwords search partners' EU market share. In this Italian case (I assume) the fine is scaled to the size of the monopolised sector... Italian apps or whatnot.
This is why I called it a "violation-fine paradigm." Courts can't arbitrarily fine companies "enough to make it hurt." It has to relate to laws, specific infractions. Laws have to be general. Etc.
My point is that the infraction itself is not the problem. It's a sign of the problem, a symptom... the problem is monopoly. There's no version of adwords partner agreement (including the post-fine version) that isn't still a problem, even if it doesn't contain abuse of power clauses. The problem is that the only meaningful market for search ads is Google's. Similar issue for Amazon marketplace. There's no version of Amazon marketplace policies where amazon retail competes on a level playing field... they own the field.
You fine a company for doing something wrong. Google do things wrong, from time to time... but the main problem is what Google is, not what they do. That's derivative.
Google doesn't really have a choice. Their monetization model rests on providing increasingly complicated dashboards to lure advertisers into believing their money is well spent. As long as they haven't found an alternative model they will just blindly pay up and redo
> IMO, we need some way to declare a company "Big" and apply special rules to them. If those rules are onerous, that might create some organic pressure to split and/or help smaller incumbents compete.
What do we win here? To me it seems that letting big companies get as big as they can allows them to use economies of scale to provide quality services cheaply to all of us. Search is a prime example here, only Google seems to be able to do it as well as they do. Many others have tried and failed.
Isn't the benefit of cheap/free services far outweighed by whatever arbitrary "abuses" that are alleged to have been perpetrated? Shouldn't our attitude be primarily of bewildered amazement at the status quo instead of attempting to micromanage how Google uses the massive, amazingly positive platform it built?
>Isn't the benefit of cheap/free services far outweighed by whatever arbitrary "abuses" that are alleged to have been perpetrated?
No, because pluralism and a robust and diverse ecosystem is more important than cheap shit. Handing effectively entire control over what is visible on the internet to one company is anti-democratic madness. You're basically pulling a "but Mussolini made the trains run on time"
I'm not, I'm suggesting that an inclusive, permissive economy is the best way to fight scarcity. Scarcity, though you may not recall, was a big deal. Its opposite is "cheap shit" which is exactly what I'm advocating for as top priority. In this case, cheap (free) access to high quality internet services for everyone with an unfiltered connection.
Less permissive economic systems continue to fail spectacularly. No one is "handing" any control of anything, control is precariously maintained by staying ahead of competition.
Comparing Google to a dictator is ridiculous - who is Google murdering by deprioritizing someone's service on its platform?
between regular people and companies. I don't think it has to come at the expense of those things, a company doesn't have to be the size and scope of google to be efficient.
Companies are made up of regular people, there is no clear distinction between the two. Efficiency is a spectrum, the more efficient a company, the more the poorest of us benefit from cheaper services. Capping efficiency punishes everyone.
armies are also made up of regular people, that doesn't mean they're incapable of doing harm on a scale beyond the individual. you're also falsely equating size and efficiency
And once these regular people decide in numbers that they are tired, miss their wives, and want to go home; it goes disastrously for the commanders who have planned otherwise. For a particularly famous example see Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.
I'm not equating size and efficiency. I'm saying a combination of the two represents the optimal outcome for everyone. In a permissive economy, large, inefficient companies are vulnerable to competition, and tend towards failure.
allegedly, Google did not approve Enel X charging station finder app Juicepass on the Android Auto store due to security and standards concerns. I do not understand why Google did not provide a clear exhaustive explanation on the specifics but just a generic "We have strong standards for the publishing of apps on our Android Auto store". They are not even trying to justify or defend themselves because they don't need to - they will pay the fine and move on.
A good thing. My business unfortunately rely on the Playstore. Every update we submit I have nightmares about a rejected update or somekind of violation. I am active since the start of the store. On average once every 2 years we have a very serious issue with an app being suspended for a a reason we do not understand. I am lucky to have some ties to people inside Google, otherwise I would probably have lost (no joke) millions.
Why is the EU the only one doing anything about monopolies? I'm tired of useless US politicians letting these massive corporations run our entire country. Break them up already.
I keep hearing claims about breaking up these large tech companies, but how do you envision that should or would look like? Do you know of any good resources where I could read up more on the topic?
Which companies would this apply to? Should Apple's vertical integration be disallowed and broken up? How would you split up Twitter?
> Should Apple's vertical integration be disallowed and broken up?
Personally I think there are specific use-cases that should be identified and banned in competition law - for instance the issue here (which could be legislated against) is when companies become a marketplace/platform that they 'sell' their own services on, which their competitors also need to use their services to effectively compete.
It's the dual role of being both a marketplace and a seller on that marketplace at the same time that produces conflicts of interest and market abuse potential. Examples (on top of the Google example):
* Apple vs Spotify - Apple could retain 100% of margin on their music subscription service, while Spotify their competitor had to give away 30% of their margin to Apple if purchased via App Store (which was mandated).
* Amazon vs Marketplace Sellers - Amazon encourages other retailers to sell on their platform, but secretly spies on their data to understand if they should directly compete and undercut them.
This isn't the only thing that requires specific legislation - and other parts I personally think should be better-legislated include:
* Use of one product to entrench another non-connected product's market position (e.g. Chrome -> Google Ads is an issue because the dominance of Browser means that they also get dominance of online search, because they can track better than the competition).
* Use of market-power to ensure people offer the lowest cost on your platform, despite fees (Booking.com, Valve, Amazon).
That helped clarify a lot, thanks. All of the examples you present seem very reasonable and worth attempting to improve. It does seem like most of the larger tech companies have managed to amass so many resources and power that it's not feasible for others to compete fairly.
Another similar avenue for helping increase competition which I've been exploring is a reduction in the duration and power of IP protections. This would increase the propagation of good memes and the rate at which they may be iterated upon by others.
Because it looks corporations are the government. I really like the idea of democracy, but it looks like politics and democracy are two very different things. Actually I would love to see some usable digital democracy project coming out. I imagine things like:
- always having the possibility for a direct voting for e.g. a new law/regulation
- a (deep) hierarchy of delegates/representatives on a per topic basis
- immediate retraction of trust/support from a representative
- maybe some micro monetary support for representatives
Regardless of the merit of this particular fine, what happens when every country realizes they can just arbitrarily fine huge international companies to fund their countries?
In theory all 50 countries that Google has offices could fine them $100M - $10B based on whatever their laws are at the time, regardless of how ridiculous the laws are. It doesn't even have to be truly bad stuff. It could be something like, a country doesn't like that Google didn't censor something worldwide.
It seems like we need a more centralized way to deal with this.
Given that many countries are willing to give these same companies huge tax breaks I don’t think the power balance is biased too much towards countries.
€100M for not allowing the EnelX app (electric car charging infrastructure in Italy) with Android Auto is a significant fine. Even if €100M on its own is not much to Google, it is still an expensive precedent for similar cases in the future.
Yes, but in practice precedence has some informal weight even in civil law systems.
(And in the same spirit, precedence can be overridden relatively easily in a common law system, too, the judge just has to find an obscure aspect of the new case that allows her to argue that the old cases don't apply.)
Jurisprudence doesn’t necessarily imply a legal system where a legal precedent carries outsize weight, so I don’t quite get what you mean by it being a natural law.
Doesn’t it at least constitue a data point for future cases, where Google won’t just be able to say “we just don’t hinder competitors, you must be mistaken” and we also get vetted documents on their inner workings and processes that will make the discovery process faster on other cases.
This is a huge reason why China imposes certain rules on foreign corps if they wanted to operate there. The media and politicians makes it all about politics, but it is an entirely reasonable way to deal with foreign mega corps. Local competitors would not survive against something like Google without government protection. 100 mil fine every once in a while is just the cost of doing business for them. How many similar cases have occurred that never went to court?
Every country does protectionism in some form, it's the only way to prevent monopolies. Even the United States, where politics are led more by the free market than by citizens, throws around embargoes and regulation when important parts of the economy is threatened.
One recent example is the American attempts at sabotaging the new gas line from Russia to the EU. Companies get threatened with embargoes, insurances get cancelled, all to maintain the European dependence on the US energy market.
Protectionism protects not only the local economy, but also protects countries from foreign influence. All the major world powers want their own version of important economic and digital infrastructure to protect themselves against the other powers trying to sway public opinion. Google and YouTube are major influences in the world and without an effective ban they will continue to do so. People want convenience above all else, their own long-term interests be damned. Ignoring the threats of a globalised industry benefits no country.
that's like a well off person eating a cheap meal at McDonalds.
Fines are for show (when it comes to corporations). It's high time we start making people within companies responsible for the actions they take.
The company asked you to do something against the law/etc. Report it. Oh, you weren't taught the laws? that's a failure of the company not preparing you for the job. All higher ups should be personally fined or jailed depending on the act, you should be fined or jailed with a reduced sentence (ignorance of the law isn't a defense). And you should be able to sue the company for damages and lack of training.
These are wild ideas, I know, I'm just hoping for more personal responsibility and less hiding behind the company.
How far fine will help ? who will get benefitted ? how many people really understand ANTITRUST in its entire scope ?
IMHO, The market dominance of features provided by big tech companies like google and many other companies which provides something as a service must be consciously evaluated whenever product (and its new releases with new features) hits the market.
Big tech companies like google have too much monopoly. Each country deserve their own local vendors who are responsible for creation and operation of platform. Restricting the scope of some technology platform as service especially to a particular nation or even states can help build local jobs, also keeping the sentiments for that region.
On international level if someone wants to succeed they must be allowed but should be given limited access in each country/state by the government from very start, so that they don't overpower the local market.
The contested behaviour can influence the development of e-mobility in a crucial phase ... with possible negative spill-over effects on the growth of electric vehicles
Yes, but something tells me Google doesn't give a damn.
If Google leaves the Italian market, Italy could have a chance to create a local Google. Google's scale is huge and they have a lot of products, but a subset of these products, such as tracking, ads, search, emails, and videos, is achievable for a country like Italy in my opinion.
Maybe. I worked at Google on the indexing team from 2006-2010. During that time, I vaguely remember some announcement of a government-funded search engine project in France to beat Google. If I remember correctly, it wasn't the first time France tried a government-funded search engine.
I suspect it's more a problem of network effects than it's a problem of money. Google just has so much data at this point that it's really tough to get marginally enough better search results than Google to get a significant number of people to switch. Personally, I use DDG for ideological reasons.
I hope competition heats up in the ads and search spaces, but I'm not holding my breath, even with significant government funding.
In my time at Google, I also remember being slightly concerned about Cuil. Cuil was started by some ex-Googlers and had some sophisticated machine learning algorithms to find images to attach at the top of most search results pages. They were well-funded and supposedly had a larger corpus than Google. On launch day, Cuil inexplicably attached the image of a porn star with an unrelated name to a journalist's search for his own name. It also had tons other very bizarre choices of images, all inexplicably blamed on scaling issues due to unanticipated demand. Also, at the time that Yahoo shut down its search infrastructure to outsource Bing's search back-end, our internal quality metrics actually showed Yahoo ahead of Bing. I'm sure getting all of that Yahoo traffic to siphon up more behavioral data helped Bing's search results in the long term.
In my time at Google, I also remember being slightly concerned about Cuil. Cuil was started by some ex-Googlers and had some sophisticated machine learning algorithms to find images to attach at the top of most search results pages. They were well-funded and supposedly had a larger corpus than Google.
Not that well funded. They had about $30m of VC money, ran through it, and shut down suddenly. They also had a terrible crawler, noted for hitting sites over and over at high rates for no useful reason.
I talked to their people. I asked them how they planned to get to profitability, since they didn't run ads. They didn't have an answer to that.
Right now, Neeva, and You are search startups in similar positions. Neeva is operating, and you can get on their wait list. They have a very intrusive questionnaire you have to answer to get in. Rather than tracking what you do on line, they just ask you.
There is plenty of extremely talented people who do not work for Google or any random unicorn in California. Some people prefer to stay where they currently live. And you are not going to make many Frenchmen move continent for an American cafeteria menu.
There are some extremely talented French people but why would they work for the French government instead of remotely for... whoever they want? Unless they don’t speak English.
Working for the government can be more meaningful than selling to companies available human brain time for example. Also, working remotely is not for everyone or possible in every company.
I can understand government work being meaningful if you’re doing something that can’t be done in the private sector like setting policy, regulatory compliance, working on health or climate change etc, but why would it be meaningful to help the French government build a shitty Google clone, to the tune of a 2/3 pay cut?
It could be so many reasons. Perhaps to actually build a search engine. I doubt anyone is building Google Search from scratch anymore at Google.
And also it's not like you work for the French government, the French government is funding your company to support innovation. Most governments do that, by giving money or allowing tax optimization.
> Good for Italy -- they have no chance of creating a Google, so their best path to tech dollars is a regular cadence of these $100m fines (but not so often that Big Tech exits the Italian market).
Are you saying that it's not that Google was wrong here, but that the Italian government want to parasitize on Google?
How I understand it he is saying Google is willing to pay for "being wrong" or rather "behaving in certain ways". Now it is just kind of a fee and both sides are happy. Maybe not the perfect situation for the customers but between the two parties and with the current legal framework the deal makes sense. Doesn't it? Should we be surprised about any of the two parties optimizing their position within the given constraints? I think it is quite clear that if another outcome is desired the constraints need to be changed.
In a recent article on a new lobbying group trying to onshore chip production https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27121586 a lot of people pointed out it's this weakness incentivising lobbying.
In other words US establishment invites regulatory capture through expectation of lobbying action creating even bigger opportunities to draw a dire picture, and demand more state intervention favourable to the industry.
More lobbying & pushback > industry situation worsens > opportunity to draw a dire situation > favourable intervention & more handouts > repeat
Right. That's called "lemon socialism". Britain, in its most socialist period, the 1950s, had the government owning the railroads, the coal industry, and the steel industry. All lemons, and all way overstaffed.
If I can take a stab at it, it means that these $100 million fines are minor blips around an unchallenged central belief, held by all powerful stakeholders, that corporations should basically be allowed to exert tremendous power over markets and individuals. Essentially, the "Overton Window" for how to deal with something like Google is narrow -- fine them a hundred million or a billion -- instead of wide where possible solutions include shutting Google down, turning it into a citizens-owned co-op where every citizen in the country sits on its board, or other seemingly "outlandish" ideas.
I'm sorry but I can't express myself in a "less poetic form", because this space is not suitable for in-depth conversation and also because I don't have enough domain over the language. There's a book I can recommend though: Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, 1967.
Everything is cryptic before we understand it. When we talk for instance about Google, governments, fines, power balance, etc, we're refering at least to an immense superposition of complex systems, or perhaps you could say an hypercomplexity, or perhaps totality may be the best word depending on your perspective. In that context, my cryptic poetics only constitute an heuristic which has the intent to provoke thought, because I do not wish to abandon the totality point of view, and that would be impossible otherwise in a space like this where concision is the rule. I hope you can understand what I'm trying to say - although it took me 20 minutes to write this short reply, I'm still not confident it will adequately communicate what I'm thinking or purvey the apropriate "emotionality", which is rather cultural in essence.
I'd like to help you see how to write more concise messages. Here's how I'd rewrite your entire message:
"This is a very complex subject matter, and I don't know how to express my thoughts on it concisely. I don't want to get downvoted for my long-windedness."
It's less than a 1/5 of characters, but conveys just as much of the on-topic and non-meta parts of your response.
No. Truly, the 2 sentences I provided were made of all the real meaning I could find in your paragraph that was relevant to oblio's messages you were replying to, even after re-reading your message several times.
Judging by the upvotes I have received, other readers also agree that my summary was a good summary of your comment. I'd encourage you to practice making that paragraph you wrote smaller, with a goal of reaching a length similar to my rewrite's length. It's something I've been doing more often to make my own messages more concise, and it has definitely helped.
Google is probably a bigger economic unit than Italy at this point. Much of Europe has yet to recover economically since the 2000 market crash and Italy is worse off than most. I doubt its taking geopolitical shots and more trying to find any source of revenue they can
They should fine Google Play for something that's wrong with it -- like adding icons for "Google Play Music" and "Google Play Books" just to distract you, waste your time, weaken your mind, and either get you click on an ad.
Somehow I have the hardest time finding (i) the real Google Play (app store) and (ii) the search form for apps (Google doesn't want you to search for an app and install it, they'd like to hit your brain with an electromagnetic pulse when you visit the app store and stare at mindless ads with your tongue hanging out the site of your mouth for hours. That is, the strength of the "platform" doesn't matter, just the perception of investors that Google products are still stuffed with ads, the king is on the throne, and such...)
Slightly OT but still Google related - you did hear horrible stories of Google having close to zero customer support when it comes to their free products, but you kind of hoped it will be somewhat different with Google Suite, since well.. you are a paid customer? Well, today I'm here to tell you that after 3 months of back-and-forth thru their customer support ticketing system, I finally called my bank and asked them to file a chargeback dispute and give me back my $18 for 3 months worth of Gsuite email account. Yes, we are talking about $6 per month. But the amount of crap I witnessed thru their "customer support" is astonishing and someone should write a book about it! I was literally asked for the same questions over and over again with different reps. I was asked questions, I answered then 3 days of silence so that next rep will ask same questions. Forwarded previous questions - 3 days later another rep asks exactly the same. My favorite was argument that you cannot answer question under the question we ask - you have to add a colon ":" and then answer question next. "We cannot accept answers if you use your Enter key answering question". Unbelievable. One of the most valuable company on the planet. Fuck Google! And today, I finally have switched to Duck Duck. Even If I have to force myself to like the differences, I will not go back to using Google. /rant
The existence of other Android Auto apps mean nothing. Enel is quite a large company and I am sure it has a lot of people working on its mobile applications. Besides, they are enforcing European law.
Just because they are big in one particular sector doesn't mean that the app they built didn't have problems (security in this case). This is very likely just a way to squeeze some money from a foreign company.
It's half true, there are plenty of android auto apps on the store. The majority of them are music playing apps. Navigation apps are not allowed by google. I have 2 cars with android auto and android auto is useless for me because i cannot mirror the phone screen.
Apparently that used to be true but is no longer. OsmAnd (OpenStreetMap navigation app) is releasing their Android Auto app later this year: https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/3391
